Emotional eaters often feel enormous guilt about eating – and especially enjoyment of eating. This may seem like a small matter, but in fact guilt-free enjoyment of food is a key factor in recovery. From my book, Normal Eating® for Normal Weight:

Our modern society views enjoyment of eating in much the same way as Victorians viewed enjoyment of sex – dangerous and sinful, something to feel guilty about. It’s considered almost obscene not to be on a diet that restricts what you eat.

A few weeks ago, someone posted a message in the forum with the subject "Mindful eating feels like a punishment". Here’s an excerpt from it:

I found myself really irritated that I was hungry again this afternoon. It wasn’t because I didn’t want food or didn’t know what I wanted it was because I was busy and didn’t want to take the time to sit down and eat mindfully. I kept thinking about the things I needed to get done and the things I wanted to do knowing that by stopping to eat mindfully every time I’m hungry I won’t have time to do it all. … I rushed through and stopped eating when I was still slightly hungry because I wanted to be done and get on with my day.

Her post reminded me of a blog entry I wrote, “5 Reasons Emotional Eaters Shun Mindfulness“, and made me realize there was a 6th reason. It almost sounded like she didn’t want to allow herself to enjoy eating, that she wanted to approach it as a perfunctory thing to get out of the way. She’s not alone in this. I’ve seen this same sentiment expressed many times by people in early recovery from emotional eating.

Eating is one of the great pleasures of life. Getting hungry is a wonderful opportunity for a sensual, enjoyable experience. But emotional eaters often feel guilty about eating or (worse) getting pleasure from eating. They don’t allow themselves to enjoy their meals. When I posted this in the forum thread, another member posted this response:

Sheryl, I LOVE this. It really resonates for me and explains much of why I have puzzled with Mindful eating. It is not so much the drug inducing factor of it, but much more this thing about pleasure, allowing it, seeing as a good thing. I have quite a strong "depriving" streak in me, that has kept me tough and functioning for a long time, and I think that part struggles with the simple, sensuous pleasure that is eating. I will really take this away as treasure to think about.

What about you? Does this resonate? Do you allow yourself to enjoy your meals? Do you allow yourself pleasusre in general? Or do you tend to deprive yourself while taking care of everyone else?

Something to Try…

The bedrock of Normal Eating – the key learning that makes it possible – is the deep knowledge that you have the right to pleasure and happiness. When you become convinced of this, you start to act on your own behalf in all areas of life. And then you no longer need food band-aids.

Often emotional eaters are people pleasers. They want every around them to be comfortable and happy, and pay more attention to that than their own needs. Then, because their needs go unfilled, they use food to fill the Big Empty and give themselves generic comfort and pleasure. Or sometimes people just feel so badly about themselves that they won’t raise a finger to help themselves.

One of the issues that comes up frequently with my coaching clients is that every minute of the day is either spent working, or taking care of other people – no time for themselves. So by the end of the day they are tired and spent, and they eat. Often this is the first time they’ve had to themselves all day, the first opportunity to relax, the first time since they got up that they’ve done something just for themselves.

Does this sound like you? Are you all work and no play, and then at the end of the day you eat to unwind? If so, find an hour a day – well before bedtime – that is totally yours. Do you think you can’t, that you don’t have time? That means you really need to do this. Take a real lunch break. Go sit outside or take a walk. If you are caring for kids, think about who might watch them for an hour while you take time to be a human being.

The more you think there is no time and you can’t do this, the more you need to find a way to do this. You’re not a super-hero. If you deny your basic needs, you’ll end up eating to feel better.

Please post your thoughts and experiences! I’d love to hear from you.

There are many reasons that people continue eating after they are no longer hungry. Here’s the short list:

• You don’t recognize satiation cues. You don’t recognize that you’re no longer hungry until you are past full.
• It bothers you to leave food on your plate. The reasons for this can run deep, as you’ll soon see.
• The food tastes good and you want to continue experiencing that. But what aren’t you paying attention to?
• You are in the grip of compulsion. You don’t want it, it doesn’t taste good, but you can’t stop.

You Don’t Recognize Satiation Cues

When emotional eaters start paying attention to hunger and satiation cues, they’re often startled to realize that they can’t recognize when they’re hungry or – harder yet – when they’ve had enough. It’s not surprising, when you think about it. When you eat for reasons other than hunger, you ignore these cues. After a while, you almost forget where to look for them.

When you first start asking yourself if you’re hungry or if you’re full, it’s frustrating to get the answer back, "I don’t know." But keep asking. Eventually, you will know. It’s only by continually trying to reconnect with your hunger and satiation cues that finally you will. The inner cues are still there – you just need to learn to listen again.

You Feel You Must Clean Your Plate

The crux of the "clean your plate" issue is eating according to internal cues rather than external cues – stopping when your body says to stop, rather than when your plate is empty. To some extent, the urge to eat everything on your plate is related to being disconnected from your hunger and satiation cues. But there’s more to it.

As I’m sure you’ve experienced, sometimes you keep eating when you are well aware that you are no longer hungry, and in fact you’re starting to feel uncomfortable. But as long as there is food on your plate, you feel the urge to continue eating until it’s all gone. What’s that about?

This is actually a self-esteem issue – a particular aspect of self-esteem. It’s about feeling entitled to leave food on your plate – knowing you have the right to eat according to internal signals rather than external mandates, and you’re entitled to throw away food. If you’ve spent years eating according to someone else’s rules – or at least trying – then you don’t know in your heart that you have the right to eat according to your own inner directives.

Somehow, in the mind of an emotional eater, the food on the plate becomes work to complete – something you must accomplish. You can feel this way even if you’ve served yourself, put the food on the plate yourself.

An easy out, if you’re serving yourself, is to simply put less on your plate and go back for more if you’re still hungry. But the more general solution is to know that you are entitled to throw away food. Your body is not a garbage can. If you are no longer hungry, it is better to throw the food in the garbage than down your own throat. You have the right to throw away food. You are entitled to do this! You are more important than the food.

The Food Tastes Good

If you continue to eat past full just because the food tastes good, then you are in the "neck-up" trap. You are ignoring all aspects of your body and physical experience except what’s happening in your mouth.

The experience of eating isn’t just about taste. Your entire body experiences eating. What you eat affects your emotions, your energy level, and creates physical sensations in your belly and bowels. When you’re cut off from your whole body experience – and if you hate your own body, you surely are – then you focus only on what’s happening above the neck. You experience yourself as a floating head. There are taste buds, and then the rest you ignore as best you’re able. That is how you can focus on the pleasure of taste while ignoring the discomfort signals in other parts of your body.

In Stage 2 of Normal Eating I talk about being mindful when you eat. I’m not just talking about mindfulness of your mouth experience. I’m talking about your whole body experience. It’s by reconnecting with your whole body experience that you can align the drive for pleasure with your own best interest.

You Just Can’t Stop

And then there is the situation when you are eating crap and just can’t stop. Maybe you’re bingeing in the middle of the night, eating whatever happens to be available – a jar of peanut butter or cake frosting, or something even less delectable. But you can’t stop. You’re hating yourself, you feel sick and full and you don’t even like what you’re eating, but you can’t stop.

Emotional eating is not about the food – it’s never about the food. That’s why dieting doesn’t work. Dieting is all about the food – what you are eating. But emotional eating is about something else, and if you don’t address this "something else", you will continue to do it. No type of eating past full makes this key fact more clear than the "just can’t stop" situation, when you’re eating something you don’t like and don’t want, but you can’t stop doing it.

What you need to do when you just can stop is to pause. Pause. Even if it’s for five minutes. Or one minute. For however long you can do it, pause. Pause in your anxiety and discomfort and feel your feelings. Let it all bubble up and live your own truth. Stand in your own real experience and be you, living your life. Don’t be afraid. Cry, scream, whatever you need to do, but feel your own authentic self. You’ll probably start thinking about some aspect of your life that’s really bothering you. That is your trigger – the real problem that you are trying to stuff down with food. It’s almost impossible to surface what’s triggering a binge unless you pause in the midst of the craving.

Pausing in the midst of craving is a crucial part of recovery in Normal Eating. I wrote more about this in a previous blog post, The Importance of the Pause. And of course I address it at length in my book, Normal Eating for Normal Weight.

Something to Try

Here are some skills to practice so eventually you can stop eating when you are no longer hungry:

• Eat mindfully. By this I don’t just mean pay attention to your mouth experience. Pay attention to your whole body experience. Notice how eating makes you feel throughout your body, and emotionally as well. Keep asking yourself, "Am I still hungry?"
• Monitor your thoughts. If you feel like you "should" clean your plate, remind yourself that you are more valuable and important than this food, and you are entitled to throw it out.

• Pause in the heat of the moment. When you are in the grip of compulsion and craving, notice it and pause. You may very well continue eating after the pause, but even a pause of one minute or five minutes strengthens your "emotional muscle", preparing you to be able to stop in the future. A baby doesn’t learn to walk by leaping from the crib. First, it crawls. Similarly, you can’t stop emotional eating until you are first able to pause.

  So practice pausing, and feel proud of however long you are able to do it. Even if you end up eating afterwards, you have made progress. Those minutes you paused are minutes of genuine recovery.

Please post your thoughts and experiences! I’d love to hear from you.

Most of us don’t live in isolation. The people closest to you usually know all about your struggles with weight and eating, and can have a profound effect on your Normal Eating journey.

When you’re coming from the diet world, you’re coming from a world in which it’s assumed that you don’t have the self-control or judgment to manage your eating on your own. At one time or another, you may even have recruited friends and family to help you stick to your diet and monitor what you eat.

But in Normal Eating, taking full responsibility for your eating choices is crucial. Normal Eating teaches you to trust yourself – teaches you that you can trust yourself. So when you stop dieting and make the shift to Normal Eating, the "helpful" interjections from family and friends to not eat this or that are no longer welcome – and in fact, interfere with your progress.

The people close to you can sidetrack your efforts in more subtle ways, as well. Whenever someone changes – even when the change is positive – there will be some resistance to the change from those close to the person.

Resistance to Change – Any Change

A shared problem – such as a shared struggle with weight – is the basis of many friendships. Remove the problem, and suddenly the relationship is threatened. What do you talk about now? If you lose weight, will it make the the other person feel bad about herself or himself?

Simply the shift in long-established roles can destabilize a relationship. You’d think that becoming a stronger more self-confident person could only help your relationships, but it can cause unexpected tensions. When one person changes, habitual ways of interacting no longer work. That threatens the relationship until a new equilibrium can be reached.

A normal weight friend may be used to seeing you as nonthreatening around the opposite sex, and suddenly you’re a competitor. Or a friendship may have been based on helping the fat friend who can never quite solve the problem. Then you suddenly solve the problem. What then? So the people close to you will frequently try to prevent you from changing.

It’s not because they are mean or bad or don’t want the best for you. It’s a natural resistance to what is initially perceived as a threat to the relationship. And in a way it is, because to continue forward, your relationship will have to shift.

You move the relationship into its new, healthier mode by setting healthy boundaries – and by recognizing that resistance to change is natural and nothing to fear. In the vast majority of situations, people will come around.

Something to Try…

The first situation I described – friends and family monitoring what you eat – is the easier situation to deal with, which is not to say it’s easy! What you need to do may be difficult, but at least it’s clear.

You need to explain to friends and family that you’ve had some realizations. A permanent solution to your struggles with eating and weight involves taking full responsibility for your own eating. Explain that the best way they can help you is to never comment on what you eat, and trust you to work it out for yourself. This kind of self assertion can be hard, but it’s essential.

The second situation – the subtle social pressures that work against personal change – is a more difficult challenge. Emotions can run deep on both sides. Your most potent weapon is awareness.

Notice when someone who loves you responds to your weight loss by trying to get you to eat. Perhaps they are suddenly worried about your getting "too thin" (when you know, objectively, this is not the case). Or maybe they are suddenly presenting you with special treats that you just "have to" try.

In particular, be on the alert for feelings of guilt. Is someone making you feel guilty about doing what you need to do to take care of yourself?

With awareness, you can create some distance from the emotions of the situation. Never feel guilty for self-care or making your own eating choices – this is not only your right, but one of your fundamental responsibilities in life. Just as you have the right to eat something, you have the right not to eat something. You are never obligated to eat what’s put in front of you just to protect someone else’s feelings – never. You need to know this in your heart.

Are you wobbly about your rights and responsibilities? Check out the chapter on Healthy Boundaries in Normal Eating for Normal Weight.

Please post your thoughts and experiences!

A few days ago, director and comedian Kevin Smith was thrown off a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. He’s been speaking out about it, calling it “humiliating” and “the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” Two days ago on Mardi Gras (aka Fat Tuesday), late night comedian Craig Ferguson made fat prejudice the subject of his monologue. It is hilarious.

Do you eat because it’s time to eat, whether you’re hungry or not? A lot of people do, and then feel crappy afterwards.

If the goal is to eat when you’re hungry, does that mean regular meal times are out? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. But figuring out how to make your hunger coincide with meal times is actually a skill. People trying to stop emotional eating probably won’t be able to do this immediately.

If you’re a parent, you’ve heard the debate about whether to feed babies “on demand” (when they cry to be fed – i.e. when they are hungry), or on a schedule (at regular meal times, regardless of whether they are hungry).

A schedule is more convenient for the parent, but infants should be fed on demand until they are old enough to speak and understand the concept of meal times. Before that, if they cry and aren’t fed they just feel like they’re being starved. This can lead to emotional eating issues later in life.

Also, infants can’t regulate their intake to accomodate meal times. The same can be said for an emotional eater in early recovery.

Eating at regular meal times has some advantages. If you work outside the home during the day, you may have preset lunch or dinner hours. If you don’t eat then, you don’t have another chance until you get off work. There is also the social aspect of eating with family and friends. You can’t enjoy dinner with others unless you schedule the meal in advance, and then arrange to be hungry at that time.

But once eating becomes disconnected from hunger, meal times become just an excuse for recreational eating, a habit that no longer serves a function. The reason for scheduling meal times is to free you to do other things at non-meal times. If you’re eating between meals as well as at meals, there is no point to the scheduled meals.

Something to Try…

The best way to break out of this habit is to go back to on-demand eating for a while. Ignore conventional meal times to the extent that your schedule allows, and eat the way infants eat – when you’re hungry. Try this for at least a month, and see how it feels.

Once you get used to eating for hunger, you can slowly work your way back to regular meal times, if this is convenient for you. Note that eating at regular meal times means not eating between meals! With practice, you’ll learn how much you need to eat at each meal to hold you until the next meal. You’ll also find that to be hungry for breakfast, you must stop eating at a certain point in the evening. (This also can help you to sleep better.)

Do you eat at meal times and between meal times, as well? How does it feel to eat “on demand”, independent of conventional meal times?

The end of the year is a time to review and take stock. The news media recounts the major events of the last 12 months, and makes lists of the public figures who have died. And we, as individuals, think about our own lives. What happened to us over the last year? What went right? What went wrong? What can we do to make next year better?

Even after good years there is always a little sadness because the passage of time reminds us we are mortal. So resolutions for the new year inevitably involve renewed commitment to healthy habits: quit smoking, exercise more, lose weight. Unsurprisingly, given that the new year comes after a month of heavy holiday eating, a commitment to lose weight is the most common new year resolution of all.

For most people, the commitment doesn’t last. Good intentions translate into a burst of short-term effort followed by discouragement, self-recrimination, and finally giving up. You stop even trying, for a while, anyway.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

Here are the secrets to turning your new year resolutions into your new reality:

1. Put your efforts in the right direction. Don’t waste time on another diet. Fix the underlying problem – the compulsion to eat when you’re not hungry. If 90% of your eating involves moderate amounts of nutritious food, you will be your normal weight. Everyone knows what this means. You eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, and eat mainly fresh, unprocessed food. If you know what to do and you’re not doing it, the problem is compulsion, and this is not solved by a diet.
2. Approach the problem with the right attitude. The fix is not going to be quick or easy, and anyone who promises that it will be is lying. Emotional eating is a very difficult problem to fix. If it weren’t, you’d have solved it already. Overeating makes you miserable and you’ve been trying for years to stop. So don’t expect to instantly shed your compulsion, and lose at the rate of a pound a day. It sounds extreme when I put it that way, but people really do weigh themselves every morning and feel despair if another pound isn’t gone!
3. Believe that you can do this, because you can. The solution isn’t quick or easy, but it’s achievable, and not just for others. You can do this. As long as you believe this core truth, you will keep trying until you reach your goal. The only way you can fail is if you stop trying. One common reason for discouragement is the unrealistic expectation of a quick and easy fix. Another is the habit of not believing in yourself – something that the Normal Eating method addresses directly.
4. Have patience; learn to take pride in small steps forward. I can’t tell you how many people have joined the Normal Eating Support Group and expect to be able to eat when hungry and stop when full on the first day – or at least by the end of the first week. It doesn’t work that way! That’s where you get at the end of the process, it’s not where you start. Recovery is a journey. Learn to enjoy each step along the way. Life is about the journey, not the destination.
5. Use every tool available to you, and don’t hesitate to ask for help. Compulsive eating is a hard problem – a very hard problem. One interesting result of the Emotional Eating Test I posted last month was the answer to this question: “I feel like I should be able to solve my weight problem without help.” Three-quarters of both men and women answered “yes” to this question! I’ve observed many times over the years that those who post the most in the Normal Eating Support Group tend to make the fastest progress. This is because they’re willing to ask for help.

If you’re an emotional eater, 2010 probably isn’t the first year you’ve promised yourself to lose weight and get in shape once and for all. But it can be the first year you keep this promise. You can achieve the goal of looking your best, and finally feeling comfortable in your own body.

Something to Try…

Psychologists have done studies comparing high achievers to low achievers, trying to divine the secrets to the high achievers’ success. One consistent difference is that high achievers set goals that are just slightly beyond where they are now. The goals are a stretch, but clearly within reach. Low achievers, in contrast, tend to set stratospheric goals. For example, a high achieving college student might have as a career goal a good paying job in her field of study. For a low achieving student, the goal might be wealth and fame.

Setting achievable goals is the key to success. With that in mind, what are your goals – your resolutions – for the next month, the next 6 months, and the next year? Make three lists, and then imagine yourself doing what it takes to reach your goals. Are your goals realistic? Can you visualize yourself doing what it takes to get there? Are you willing to put in the work? If so, you can turn your resolutions into reality.

Please share your lists and post your thoughts here!

Are you an emotional eater? If so, what are the reasons you eat? Are you mainly soothing negative emotions, or do you eat primary to distract yourself from the real problems in your life? How does being fat affect your view of yourself, and perhaps even serve you?

Take the test and find out! After you’ve completed the test, you’ll get:

• An interpretation of your own answers.
• A summary of how others answered, shown separately for men and women.

Men and women both struggle with emotional eating, but they may eat for different reasons – as the summary stats will reveal. (You may have to come back to check the summary stats. The test was just posted so the counts are still low.)

After you take the test, come back here and post a comment saying what you thought of it. Was it informative? Did the interpretation seem right? Were you surprised at the scores of men versus women?

Today is the day after Halloween and candy leftovers abound. Are you locked in a war with yourself about eating it? Here’s how to take the power out of the candy and put it back in you, where it belongs.

The crucial shift is in your attitude. You must know on a deep level – not just intellectually, but emotionally – that you have the right to eat whatever you want. This is true no matter what your current weight. If you feel your rights are constrained by societal mandates – that others can tell you what you should or shouldn’t eat – you’ll stay stuck in a childlike mindset, either doing as you’re told or rebelling against it. Only people with the right to choose can make choices. You can’t freely choose to forego candy or eat a salad unless you understand you have the right to make either choice.

This understanding – this crucial shift in attitude – is the primary goal in Stage 1 of Normal Eating. Recognizing your right to choose won’t make all cravings go away – there’s more fueling emotional eating than just feelings of deprivation – but it will help. And understanding you have this right forms the foundation for progress in later stages.

Note that simply eating a food does not mean you know you have the right to eat it. Someone in the forum posted this recently:

To me, it seems that the goal of Stage 1 is to understand that you are allowed to eat whatever you want. Since I am struggling with bingeing right now, I think I have the “eat whatever you want” part down pat.

Actually, if you’re bingeing, it’s highly unlikely you have the “eat whatever you want part down pat." Usually people who are bingeing feel wracked with guilt about their eating and filled with self-condemnation. They don’t feel at all like they have the right to be doing what they’re doing. And the self-flagellation that goes along with bingeing tends to perpetuate the cycle.

Stage 1 of Normal Eating is not something you eat your way through, it’s something you think your way through. If you eat something and feel guilty about it, you have not not progressed in Stage 1. What’s important isn’t whether you let yourself eat a particular food, but what you say to yourself about eating it. You may actually eat it or you may not – that’s not what’s important.

The goal of Normal Eating is to stop being at war with yourself, where one part of you is pulling you one way, and another part of you is beating the crap out of yourself for it. The first step in the recovery process is to eliminate the false parent you’re rebelling against – the "shoulds" in your head. There are no "shoulds" when it comes to eating; you have the right to make whatever eating choices you want.

Your Body, Your Life

You can know intellectually that you have this right, yet find it hard to accept emotionally – especially if you’re fat. Our society can make fat people feel ashamed of eating anything at all. From someone else in the forum:

I understand the concept that I have the right to eat what I choose. I get that, and I agree with it. However, I feel guilty about EVERYTHING that I eat. Healthy food, junk food, all of it.
…
I have to live in a world where I am ostracized for how I look.

The solution to this may surprise you: Recognize that you have the right to be fat. It is your body, your life, and no one has the right to tell you what to do with either. This is a core boundary issue.

Now, perhaps you don’t choose to be fat. Perhaps you are fat because you are driven by compulsion and unable to make true choices. You still have the right to be fat! The goal of the Normal Eating program is to free you from compulsion so you can make choices. But one of these choices may be that you prefer eating what you want over being thin. That is a legimate choice for you to make about your life. Or you may not choose to be as large as you are now, but down the road you may decide you prefer to eat cookies and be a size 12 than eat no sweets and be a size 0. That is a legitimate choice, too, and your right. No one else has the right to tell you how much you can weigh. It’s simply none of their business.

There still may be fat bigots who ostracize you – nothing to be done about them. But at least you can stop ostracizing yourself. That will help quite a bit. Most fat people say horrible things to themselves. It’s important to monitor your self-talk and stop doing that. There is only one person whose opinion of you really matters, and that is you. If you don’t feel good about yourself as a fat person, losing weight will not fix this. In fact, it’s the reverse. You must feel good about yourself in order to give yourself the gift of a healthy body.

Some proponents of the non-diet approach say it’s okay to eat whatever you want because there is no such thing as a “fattening food”, that it’s just a matter of how much you eat. This isn’t completely correct. There are fattening foods: Nutrient-empty snacks and desserts loaded with quick-digesting carbs are fattening – not because of their calories, but because of their effect on your hormones (see my post on the real cause of obesity). Granted you won’t gain weight from one bite of a brownie, but that’s not the point.

You have the right to eat whatever you want, regardless of whether the food is fattening, because you have the right to be fat. You have the right to do whatever you want with your own body, without limitation. You even have the right to eat in a way that kills you, though you probably will choose not to do this once you reach Stage 4 and become able to make choices. The main point is this: Your right to choose what you eat is absolute. This is your body and your life.

Something to Try…

If you are feeling plagued by your leftover Halloween candy – or if you’re at war with yourself over eating any other type of food – try this novel approach:

• Constantly tell yourself – every time you even think about eating something – that you have the right to eat whatever you want. This needs to become a refrain in your head that you repeat constantly, to counteract the constant cultural pressure in the other direction.
• Ask yourself this very important question: Do I want to eat this right now – do I truly feel like eating it? The answer might be yes, or it might be no. Either way is fine. What’s important is that you ask yourself the question to reinforce in your mind that it is a choice.
• If you decide to eat it, don’t scarf it down so fast that 10 seconds later it’s like it never happened. That’s guilty eating. If you’re going to eat it, enjoy it, savor it. Eat it mindfully. (And if that’s hard, check out this previous post: 5 Reasons Emotional Eaters Shun Mindfulness.)

After you’ve tried this, please report back! How did it feel to do that? Do you feel your attitudes shifting, on an emotional level? Do you feel angry about societal pressure to take away your right to eat what you want? Did the shift in your thinking cause your eating to change at all?

Last night I went to hear Deepak Chopra talk about his new book, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul. The book was just released yesterday and we all got copies, so I’ve got it hot off the press. The talk, sponsored by the New York Open Center, was held in the magnificent Riverside Church, which for some reason I’d never been in before. I don’t know how I’ve managed to live in New York City for 30 years without seeing this beautiful church.

I haven’t finished reading the book yet – I only just got it last night – but if it’s anything like Chopra’s talk about the book, then I expect it’s wonderful. His talk was amazing. I particularly noticed one of the last things he said: “Changing one’s diet and lifestyle is a byproduct of shifting consciousness.” I noticed it because I say the same thing in Normal Eating for Normal Weight. When your thinking changes, you become able to change how you eat without fighting with yourself. It just happens as a natural byproduct.

Deepak Chopra Book Launch, Riverside Church, NYC. Taken by someone from the Open Center, standing just behind Chopra. I had taken my own picture - or thought I had - but it disappeared from my camera.

About a year ago, someone in the Normal Eating Support Group posted an interesting message about how neuroscience supports the power of the “pause” – a key tool in the Normal Eating approach. The discussion is still ongoing. From the original post:

Recurring / obsessive thoughts are due to neural pathways that have been established in the brain – actual, measurable, observable processes going on there. But neural pathways are not fixed – they can be changed. Compulsive / addictive thoughts go on in the prefrontal cortex. Brain scans show that the prefrontal cortex also becomes active when one is making decisions for oneself. However it is not active when one simply follows instructions (eg a diet). Nor is the prefrontal cortext used when we act mindlessly on our urges and compulsions (eg binging). So if you have spent a lot of time following instructions (dieting) and / or acting mindlessly on impulses (bingeing) you need to work on creating new prefrontal cortex pathways (I’ve seen the term ‘emotional muscle’ used a bit on this forum, which I assume is referring to the process of creating new neural pathways).

So how do you change these neural pathways? Simply avoiding feeling the urge to binge (by distracting oneself with other activities, trying to ignore it, numbing out in some other way) does NOT work – no changes take place in the neural pathways when you avoid the feeling. You have to allow yourself to experience the feelings and the desire mindfully, and THEN make the choice not to act on your compulsive urge to eat (or to pause). This process of allowing oneself to experience the desire but then making the decision for oneself not to act on it, actually causes changes in the brain to occur. New neural pathways are established. The more you practice this (or exercise your ‘emotional muscle’) the easier it becomes because the neural pathways become more established.

Chopra talked at length about exactly this. Research has demonstrated that thinking changes the structure of your brain – called “neuronal plasticity”. Not only that, he says that for this to occur physiologically, your thinking also must be able to change gene expression. That means that you literally can change yourself and your destiny by how you think.

This reminded me of a NOVA scienceNOW piece on “epigenetics” – how lifestlye and environment can change gene expression. Researchers have found that as identical twins get older, they actually become less identical. Their gene expression changes depending on their diet, lifestyle choices, and perhaps – as Chopra says – the way they think. By the time they reach old age, there are so many differences in gene expression that their DNA hardly looks identical anymore.

Chopra said that as many as 500 different genes can change with diet and lifestyle – and perhaps the way we think – including genes for diseases such as cancer. The upshot is that we have much more control over our destinies than we realize. How we look at ourselves and the world is really everything, and potentially transformative. We can change ourselves and change our destiny by changing how we think.

If you read Normal Eating for Normal Weight, you’ll see that I talk at length about changing unhelpful patterns of thought. This is the key to recovery from emotional eating. Emotional eating is not an eating problem, it’s a thinking problem. As your viewpoint – your “consciousness” – shifts, your diet and lifestyle changes as a natural byproduct. It all starts with your thinking.

Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear them.

Editing Note: This post and the previous post originally were one long article.

In my previous post I explained why nutrition information has a role in the non-diet approach – not as a rule, but as information. But with all the contradictory nutrition advice out there, is there really such a thing as “good nutrition”? There is not one single nutrition principle that isn’t contested by someone somewhere. Doesn’t this mean that there are no reliable facts about nutrition, and everything is subject to reversal?

Actually, no, though it can feel that way at times. While many details of nutrition are speculative, some principles are backed by voluminous research. So how do you separate proven facts from tentative theories presented as facts, or outright misinformation?

Identifying True Nutrition Facts

Misinformation runs rampant in nutrition more than any of field of science. There is so much contradictory advice that most people throw up their hands and decide no one knows anything.

But think about it. Is it really possible that we know enough physics to put a man on the Moon, and we know enough human biology to perform successful brain surgery, and yet we don’t know one reliable fact about nutrition – not even something as basic as whether meat is good for us? Does that make sense?

In nutrition, as in all other areas of science, there are some very well-proven facts that are truly beyond dispute, and then there are theories where the evidence is much thinner. There are two big obstacles to separating out the facts from the theories and misinformation:

• A public information campaign starting in the mid 1970s presented certain untested theories as facts – theories since proven beyond a doubt to be wrong. These include the idea that a high carb, low fat diet is best for health, and that saturated fat and cholesterol is bad for the heart, while polyunsaturated vegetable oils are heart-healthy. In fact, the opposite is true – the evidence is overwhelming. Our current obesity epidemic dates to the dissemination of this bad advice. And yet the misinformation persists because the agencies that disseminated it can’t find a face-saving way to admit their error. (See this previous post for details.)
• Most books and articles about nutrition do not differentiate between what’s known for sure – the facts backed by mountains of evidence – versus recent theories with thin support. So when one of these theories is debunked, people feel like they can’t trust any nutrition advice.

I don’t pay much attention to unproven theories from epidemiological studies. These are the iffy so-called “facts” that are constantly getting reversed. A couple years ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by Gary Taubes on the problems with epidemiological studies, and why advice from these studies is so often found to be wrong. Epidemiological studies follow large groups of people for long periods of time – what drugs they’re taking, what diseases they get, etc. – and make inferences about what caused what. The inferences are no more than hypotheses – an epidemiological study cannot prove causation – but the news media loves the hypotheses and disseminates them as fact. Worse yet, doctors sometimes act on these unproven hypotheses, to the detriment of public health.

Nor do I pay much attention to findings from controlled studies that haven’t been replicated. There are zillions of these, often extremely narrow in scope. If a study hasn’t been replicated, there is a chance that the finding was random – just a chance outcome. Also, the narrowness of most controlled studies makes generalized conclusions highly questionable. The observed effect may be trivial compared to larger effects that were not part of the study. You can’t draw general conclusions from a narrow controlled study without confirmation from other directions.

But not all nutrition advice is based on flimsy evidence. I do pay attention to nutrition principles that have been proven repeatedly in controlled studies, and especially when cross-confirmed by studies in completely different fields. One example is the indisputable danger to health of a high carb, low fat diet. Evidence comes from countless studies in multiple fields, including endocrinology, biological anthropology, and biochemistry (fat metabolism), along with studies of isolated populations still eating traditional diets. Another example of indisputable fact is the kinds of fats that are good for us (not polyunsaturated vegetable oils). Healthy versus unhealthy fats will be the subject of a future blog post.

Reality Check: Did We Evolve Eating It?

A quick and reliable touchstone for determining whether a so-called nutrition fact makes any sense is by reference to the diet humans evolved eating – the Paleolithic diet. The human genus first appeared on Earth about 2.6 million years ago. This was the start of the Paleolithic Era. From that time until just 10,000 years ago – the start of agriculture and the Neolithic era – all humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies.

The theory of evolution says that our bodies adapt to what is on hand. The individuals whose bodies were best able to use the nutrition from the available food lived to reproduce. Thus the food that was available to human beings for the first 2 million years of their existence is the food that the human body is adapted to eat. It defines good nutrition.

People in hunter-gatherer societies may suffer more frequently from accident and contagious disease, but non-infectious disease – heart disease, diabetes, cancer, colitis, multiple sclerosis, asthma, lupus, etc. – is virtually nonexistent. We know this from studying modern hunter-gatherer societies. The obvious culprit is diet – the new foods we’ve started eating that our bodies are not adapted to use. When hunter-gatherer societies switch from traditional diets to Western diets, they suddenly develop all the non-infectious diseases that afflict our society – diseases previously unknown to them.

While it’s impossible to know exactly what Paleolithic people ate, we can make some good guesses. One way we know is the structure of our digestive tracts, which are very similar to that of dogs and other carnivorous animals, and very dissimilar to that of herbivores (animals that eat only plants).

There is other evidence that we evolved as meat eaters. Fossil remains of large animals like wooly mammoths show marks from stone knives. Plus studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies show that most of their calories come from animal food. From the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:

Our analysis showed that whenever and wherever it was ecologically possible, hunter-gatherers consumed high amounts (45–65% of energy) of animal food. Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (56–65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived >50% (56–65% of energy) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. This high reliance on animal-based foods coupled with the relatively low carbohydrate content of wild plant foods produces universally characteristic macronutrient consumption ratios in which protein is elevated (19–35% of energy) at the expense of carbohydrates (22–40% of energy).

We also know some practical things. Paleolithic humans did not keep animals – they hunted them. You don’t milk animals you hunt. And we know that until the Neolithic era 10,000 years ago, most people over the age of 3-4 (after weaning) did not have the enzyme to digest lactose, the sugar in milk. Many people today still lack this enzyme, and are lactose intolerant.

One reason that anthropologists think that Paleolithic people did not eat grain is because it was virtually impossible to gather before agriculture, when we specially bred wheat so it would stay on the stalk and be easier to harvest. Also, grain is tiny – it’s just too time-consuming to gather this.

Until very recently, it was thought that humans starting cooking their food only 200,000 years ago, and for most of their evolution ate their food raw. A Harvard anthropologist recently debunked this idea in a fascinating book called Catching Fire. He argues that it was actually the discovery of cooking that allowed our brains to grow so large – that cooking made us human. I thought his argument was very convincing, though some don’t believe it. Many people still use the touchstone of “can you eat it raw” to determine whether Paleolithic people ate it. You can’t eat grain raw; cooking is required to remove toxicity. But even if you allow that Paleolithic people cooked, they probably did not eat grain because of the harvesting difficulty.

In short, here’s what we know: Our ancestors ate the meat of animals they hunted – mammals (herbivores), birds, and fish. They ate eggs only rarely (in spring, when they could find them and climb up to reach them). On rare occasion they’d eat honey, but they had to brave bees to get it. The only milk product they ate was mother’s milk for the first few years of life, and never again after they were weaned. They ate the plants they found growing in the wild – mostly the leaves, fruits, and flowers. They probably only ate roots or seeds in winter when they were desperate since these are harder to harvest and may contain anti-nutrients (cause a belly ache). “Seeds” include grain, beans, and tree nuts – all of these are plant seeds of one kind or another. In particular, they ate little or no grain – the seeds of plants in the grass family. Note that corn is a grain – a corn stalk is a giant stalk of grass. Wild corn was originally a small plant; it’s now big due to agricultural breeding.

Paleolithic people ate plenty of red meat containing saturated fat, but relatively little carbohydrate. Carbohydrate can take the form of starch or sugar, and is mainly found in roots and seeds (the storage parts of plants), sweet fruits, and honey. All but roots are seasonal, honey is dangerous to obtain, and many roots and seeds are toxic raw and difficult to harvest. Paleolithic people did not eat refined or processed food of any kind – no white sugar, white flour, white rice, or vegetable oil. You can’t make any of these things with stone-age technology. If a food can’t be made with a stone knife and a sharp stick (and perhaps fire), they didn’t eat it.

When you evaluate nutrition advice, the general principle is this: Advice that moves you away from what we evolved eating is highly suspect and probably wrong. Advice that moves you closer to what we evolved eating makes common sense and is probably right.

In general, be suspicious of what Michael Pollan calls “nutritionism”, advice based on the nutritional breakdown of a food rather than the whole food. Avoid weird foods that require advanced technology to produce, no matter what their health claims. Why? Because we don’t know what we don’t know. We can be sure that the Paleolithic diet defines good nutrition, but we can’t reliably list all the micro- and macronutrients that make it so.

Why Nutrition Matters

Beyond the obvious motivation to live a long and healthy life, nutrition matters for this reason:

Not all compulsive eating is emotional eating.

For people whose bodies are sensitive to the quick-digesting carbs we are not adapted to eat (virtually everyone who is overweight), compulsive eating has a physiological component.

Some people can eat a diet high in white flour and white sugar and suffer no obvious ill effects. Others develop unstable blood sugar, carb cravings, and Metabolic Syndrome (obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes). At some point, people in recovery for emotional eating need to address this or they won’t fully reach their goals.

I’m not saying you can never eat another brownie. Nutrition information is just information – it’s not a rule. Not every eating decision has to be based on nutrition. Please don’t try to follow a 100% Paleolithic diet and then pummel yourself when the very thought of not eating grain or sugar makes you crave it.

Just be aware. Notice how refined carbs affect you – both immediately after eating and a few hours later. You may eventually decide you prefer to eat them less often because of how they make you feel.

Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear them.